Toh Hsien Min (b. 1975)
BIOGRAPHY
Toh Hsien Min read English at Keble College, Oxford, where he took first-class honours and presided over the Oxford University Poetry Society. Since graduation he has worked mainly in finance.
Hsien Min’s published work includes Iambus (1994), The Enclosure of Love (2001), and Means To An End (2008), but also numerous appearances in international periodicals such as Acumen, the London Review of Books and Poetry Salzburg Review and anthologies such as Carcanet’s Oxford Poets 2013 and W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century. He has read at the likes of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival and the Runokuu Poetry Festival in Finland. In 2010, he received the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council, and Means to an End was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.
In the 2013 Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, Hsien Min was described as “an observant traveller and inventive formalist, adept at casual rhyme, colloquial phrasing and poignant structural returns… Means to an End… broke forcefully out of this mould in flowing O’Haraesque verse paragraphs reflecting on the enmeshed existence of the poet as a global consumer.” Monocle has described his work as “a new national narrative”.
Hsien Min also serves as founding editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
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